Jensen - The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London

The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London

For three centuries, ballad-singers thrived at the heart of life in London. One of history s great paradoxes, they were routinely disparaged and persecuted, living on the margins, yet playing a central part in the social, cultural, and political life of the nation. This history spans the Georgian heyday and Victorian decline of those who sang in the city streets in order to sell printed songs. Focusing on the people who plied this musical trade, Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates their craft and their repertoire, the challenges they faced and the great changes in which they were caught up. From orphans to veterans, prostitutes to preachers, ballad-singers sang of love and loss, the soil and the sea, mediating the events of the day to an audience of hundreds of thousands. Complemented by sixty-two recorded songs, this study demonstrates how ballad-singers are figures of central importance in the cultural, social, and political processes of continuity, contestation, and change across the nineteenth-century world.

Oskar Cox Jensen is a Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Napoleon and British Song , 1797 1822 (2015), co-editor of Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (2018) and a special forum of Journal of British Studies : Music and Politics in Britain (2021), and author of numerous book chapters and articles in journals including Studies in Romanticism .

The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London

Oskar Cox Jensen

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

314 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India

79 Anson Road, #06 04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108830560

DOI: 10.1017/9781108908108

Oskar Cox Jensen 2021

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2021

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-108-83056-0 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Figures

Tables

Musical Examples

Recordings

Songs are numbered in the order in which they are first encountered in the text.

1 Sprig of Shillelah (Popularised by John Henry Johnstone, c .1800)

2 The Black Joke (Of Irish origin, 1720s)

3 The Ladies Fall (English, 1619 or earlier)

4 Tyburn Tree (John Gay, 1728, to the tune of Greensleeves )

5 Polly Will You Marry Me? (Sung by Billy Waters, 1810s)